Brussels, 18/09/2000 (Agence Europe) - On the fringe of the General Affairs Council, on Monday, was held the seventh Ministerial session of the Intergovernmental Conference on reforming the institutions of the European Union. The meeting, in two stages, was first devoted to the extension of qualified majority voting within the EU Council of Ministers. The French Presidency wanted to highlight six subjects of a more political nature, on which abandoning unanimity remains very disputed, these are: certain tax aspects,, provisions affecting social security, measures against discrimination, provisions relating to visas, asylum and immigration, and the common trade policy (on services and intellectual property rights). The debate then continued into the evening, in "super limited session", on subjects concerning the European Commission. "the question of the number of Commissioners is a hard part of the negotiations", said Pierre Vimont, France's Permanent Representative to the EU, recalling "for moot subjects, ministers had decided in Evian (at the informal meeting of the General Affairs Council) to talk in small committees to have a more useful discussion.
The meeting had begun by an exchange of views with Nicole Fontaine, European Parliament President. Concerned by the fact that at less than a month from the informal summit of Biarritz, "no tangible decisive progress" had been made, she called on the Fifteen for a "lead of political will". "In the media, among the public, within the European Parliament, the feeling is beginning to grow that the Conference is continuing to tread water on the three left-overs of Amsterdam, i.e., the three main locks that would block the enlargement process (…) the prevailing feeling is that political negotiations are not being seriously engaged in", she said before feeling that the "case by case" assessment of the fields susceptible of passing to qualified majority voting has lead to no progress until now, "due to the crossed vetoes of the various delegations". "The Parliament would have wanted an inverse method, consisting of setting the principal of qualified majority as the general rule", she reminded, doubting that the list of these new fields would not reduce the congruent portion.